New sound-research room creates buzz, but no echoes

Friday

Jul 14, 2017 at 4:00 AM

By Sandi DoughtonThe Seattle Times

ELLENSBURG, Wash. — Andy Piacsek swings open a bank vault-style door on what looks like a chamber of horrors.

Spiky wedges sprout from the walls and ceiling. Piacsek, a physics professor at Central Washington University, stands on the only flat surface: a metal grating suspended above clawlike serrations thrusting up from the floor.

Injuries are inflicted here, Piacsek confirms — but only to the occupants’ musical sensibilities.

“It hurts my ears,” said Megumi Taylor, a flute player and student who joined Piacsek in the chamber on a recent afternoon. “I don’t like the way it sounds in here.”

The 12-by-12-foot space is so quiet that many people find it off-putting. Thick walls and an internal suspension system that’s separate from the rest of the building insulate the room from outside noise and vibrations.

The convolution of melamine foam wedges is configured to absorb sounds that originate within the room — such as notes from Taylor’s flute — and prevent them from reverberating or echoing.

That’s why it’s called an anechoic chamber, Piacsek said.

Stripped of the rich resonance created as melodies carom around a concert hall, the result is a dry sound that doesn’t appeal to music-lovers but is perfect for scientific analysis.

“If you’re trying to study something that’s making a sound, like a violin or a flute, you don’t want sounds bouncing off the walls that will interfere with your measurements,” Piacsek said.

Microsoft's most-advanced chamber recently captured the Guinness record as the world’s quietest room.

Although Central Washington's facility in Ellensburg has been operational for only a few months, researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Puget Sound have used it for projects as diverse as analysis of trumpets and development of a military sound-tracking device.

Piacsek, who plays piano and dabbles in violin, plans to use the chamber to tackle common beliefs among musicians — such as the contention that a violin that has been “broken in” through mechanical shaking sounds better than a new instrument.

Rand Worland, who teaches physics at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, ran sound tests in the anechoic chamber to investigate the way the shape of a trumpet’s bell affects the sound it produces. One of his students wants to compare different techniques for muting or dampening drums, while another is keen to explore the plunger mutes used to create a wah-wah effect in trumpets and trombones.

“This is a pretty unusual facility for a place like CWU,” Worland said.

Peter Dahl and David Dall’Osto of the University of Washington's Applied Physics Lab used the anechoic chamber to tackle a military problem: development of a sensitive, inexpensive instrument that pinpoints the direction from which a sound — such as gunshots or the roar of a plane — originates by detecting disturbances in air molecules kicked up by passing acoustic waves.

The anechoic chamber, which is the centerpiece of Central Washington’s new $1.4 million acoustics lab, is also a great place for students to get hands-on experience with research, Piacsek said.

Taylor, the flute player, conducted experiments to see whether strap-on metal plates, marketed as a way to improve the tone of woodwind instruments, really work. She didn’t see much effect, but she acknowledged that there might have been variables she wasn’t able to control.

Trombone player Jace Rowland played his instrument at various angles relative to a microphone to see how directionality affects what an audience hears.

Like Taylor, Rowland doesn’t like to hear himself play in the chamber. “The sound feels like it dies even before it leaves the horn,” he said.

Piacsek said it’s not the silence that strikes people most, but the queer lack of reverberation.

Some visitors say it feels as if their ears are stopped up because they hear so much less noise than usual. To Dahl, being in the chamber was reminiscent of being in a forest blanketed with snow. “It’s very stunning,” he said.

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